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Asus Striker II Extreme Review

Testing:

The Asus Striker II Extreme will be put through our benchmarking suite to see what kind of performance the motherboard delivers. The OverclockersClub series of benchmarks include both system tests and gaming benchmarks to verify the performance of this product. I will be comparing the performance of the Striker II Extreme against the X48T-DQ6. The tests will compare performance against the two to see whether or not the performance of the Nvidia Chipset can eclipse that of the Intel X48 board. Testing will be a direct comparison of our stock speed benchmarking; all clock speeds and memory timings will be as close as possible to offer a fair comparison on each of the boards. All motherboard and video card settings were left at setup defaults, again to eliminate any variables.

Overclocking:

The Striker II Extreme can overclock, but unfortunately, not quite to the level I have achieved on several other boards with this processor. Given the dearth of settings in the BIOS, it does take time to find a nice stable overclock. Pretty much every voltage and many of the memory sub-timings needed to be tweaked for maximum performance. My CPU is capable of 470MHz FSB, but due to the way the dividers are managed, I was only able to get stable at 450 MHz (1800MHz); the memory, on the other hand, was good up to 1000MHz (2000MHz). These speeds did not require massive voltages to get the job done. In fact the memory only needed 1.86 volts to hit that number. While 450 and 1000MHz are nice, the performance hit from running the memory unlinked is noticeable on this Nvidia board. With that in mind, I went to the well again and set the memory to Linked and Synced, which matches the memory and CPU FSB and essentially gives a 1:2 CPU to RAM ratio. By doing this, the performance increases dramatically, and this is how I ran the overclocked benchmarks. In fact, at this level of performance, it's stable enough to crunch out work units for our Folding @ Home team. The overclocking recovery tool is similar to that on many of the Asus boards I have used recently. Turn the computer off and restart, and the last good settings are loaded so that the board boots right up. If the overclocked settings were far enough off the mark that even the reboot does not fix the issue, then you can always power down completely and the board resets to BIOS defaults to get you rolling. The one issue I had came while changing the memory in an effort to push the speed envelope - I was hung on the CPU INIT screen on the LCD poster. After leaving the board powered down after several unsuccessful tries to coax it back to life, it finally rejoined the land of the living, and that issue hasn't ever come up again. Overclocks just under 1GHz and memory performance at 1000MHz are examples of the capabilities of the Striker II Extreme.